The Mother Of All Chart Porn - Presenting Goldman's Top 100 Favorite Charts

Christmas comes early for chart porn addicts this year, courtesy of Goldman Sachs which has compiled its top 100 favorite charts together in one place.

As Goldman's Hugo Scott-Gall. says:

This is a supplementary chart book to our final Fortnightly Thoughts of the year. In it, we take the best charts that we have published throughout the year and rearrange them to tell the story of the world. Our story is not just of 2011, but also of the years to come, as the world changes at a rapid clip. What follows is a quick read, and hopefully an enjoyable one.

However, there?s a very serious thread running through the following pages. It?s one of realignment, as the different speeds of the world's economies are shown starkly through a multitude of lenses, including growth in consumption, resources, number of cities, favourite brands, farming yields, trading partners and the role and size of government.

When seen together, the bigger picture of the visible and less visible changes in the world becomes clearer. Our subject matter is drawn from a myriad of areas, from the structure of global trade to the world?s highest paid sports teams.

Considering the practice of trading against their own clients is fairly well documented, I keep asking myself: Is there something I am missing about the services their clients get? I tend to assume there are lots of stupid people out there but that there are still many out there who are smarter than we think. It's that second smaller group of people I can't understand here.

Sure GS lets talk about all these 'trends' and whatnot with the removal of 3 years of ZIRP and rescuing every flailing insolvent bank practically on a daily basis....where would we be then? Wheres that chart?

Actually, unless this is supposed to illustrate some strange attractor (for which I would say they need waaaay more data) I dont' see why an x vs. dx/dt graph is more illustrative of an x vs. t graph. Actually, even if you play around with something like the Lorenz equations, it's still just cool pictures. I don't know how you make predictive assessments of stochastic systems from images like this. Is it a complicated way to shrug your shoulders while still trying to imply you are a mensa member?

Well, I'm an engineering professor surrounded by this stuff all the time. The funding chasing gig is all about making your incremental contributions look like Nobel prize winning work because apparently just being good isn't enough.

It's sad how many people chase the metrics of excellence, thinking it's a shortcut, instead of just chasing the excellence.

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it" ~ Frederic Bastiat.

Goldman left out the chart showing where we'd be without all this total ZIRP intervention. Its like charting how a marathon runner SHOULD theoretically do in the NYC marathon, but leaving out the fact 3 years ago his legs were cut off.

Everybody looking at sovereign debt, failing banks etc. as the starting point for system failure. I beleive the end comes when one or more insurance co's or a group of individuals demands physical share certificates. This is the epicentre of fraud in the system. Amasing trillions of " someone else's real wealth" into the giant ponzi of derivitives. Think you own your stocks or the real money in your account. Think again. You've been had.

Tell me more. I don't really own the stock that I think I own (or the stock that my various retirement accounts allegedly represent)? Tell me what you mean, and feel free to talk to me like I'm a 4th grader.

'Hyper-Hypothecation. No limit to it in Europe. We have a 140% limit for it in the US apparently.'

Kind of. What you are looking for is The City of London. As you saw from the last summit, when confronted with this by Merkozy David Cameron didn't want regulation over his hyper-hypothecating overlords.

I'm almost certain Frankfurt has rules against hyper-hypothecation but that doesn't mean Euro banks (just like MF and US and Canadian banks) haven't gone through subsidiaries in ... in... The City of London.

But I'm actually a step even further removed, right? Let's say I have a $500,000k in various stuff. Various funds, kind of generic distribution. The original poster is saying that those fund managers are the ones who wake up some day and say, "send me certificates". Is that the "fractional reserve stock" that you talk about? So multiple funds are referencing the same physical stock, many times over? They are likely also then representing to clients fractional reserves of what I own? Am I close?

If it is a margin account with a debit balance, then a multiple of the debit balance in the US and an unlimited amount in the UK can be pledged as collateral to a creditor of your broker/dealer, who can then pledge it as collateral to their creditors, and so on, forever in the UK system.

So, theoretically, Celente's $100,000 in rehypothecated gold could back all the debt in Europe?

I wonder how it works as far as claims go. I mean, if you were accepting hyperhypothecated collateral as a pledge for a cash loan, wouldn't you want to know if you are the second, third, nth person in line if you ever need to try to collect the assets?

I'm sure first pledge assets would have more value over second pledge, etc. The first pledge would be the first to get a claim in the event of a default, I would think. There has to be some kind of disclosure as to how many previous claims there are on an asset.

Euro group now has the liquidity three year bazooka provided by ECB; what took them so long? Its beyond me this black hole of Eurozone decision making. Not that they have solved their bank/sovereign solvency crisis. But at least they can thumb their noses at the GS short term cabal. On liquidity crunch blackmail. ECB are learning fast the ways of those anglosaxon ass holes who run WS/City. Next we'll know they'll find the balls to do fiscal coordination and eur bonding further down the road in 2013. Sometimes getting yourself into a hole leads to innovative gut reaction. Maybe they will also learn to count.

History often teaches us this as at Thermopylae, or in Anabasis of Xenophon, tales of organising the great defense/retreat plays. On a more gastronomic tone, the french also invented a national dish under dire conditions : the Cassoulet. But that's another story. It has to be served with a good bottle of Faugères; to relieve the dire painful feeling of creative, gastronomic history.

That could be the double secret derivative held under lock and key for generations by the Boned Skull Sorority referred to in elite academic circles as the "Drunken DelGammaP Dey Du Daa". Then again, very similar to an MRI of my uncle's sister's aunt's daughter's neighbor's avocado plant's cerebral cortex while it was getting laid.

The utility of a well executed cubic spline is that it makes senselessness sensible!

That sure look to be a "road map" of rating agency sovereign downgrades - that be the one that's hoped to float the indexes through the engineered blood clot bleed downs of sovereign tokens to their "predelivery" scrap value, automatically triggering Executive Order #UPURS-666 limiting gold convertible paper to "only" S&P financial stock certificates.